Adult

by David Redd

Part 1
Part 2
appear
in this issue.

conclusion

“The spin-off,” said Elta, “will be that we can improve everyone’s minds and bodies.”

Why improve people? Because, from a biological viewpoint, people were ill-suited to our changing environment. Most countries had become hotter and drier, wind-blasted and increasingly infertile, so people needed to be stronger and smarter to survive. She saw herself as some kind of world benefactor. I saw those rifles with warning labels on. I stayed quiet while Elta continued working on me.

“I can provide most of the enhancements already, through individual courses. Unfortunately they’re very expensive, and the interactions cause side effects. What Pietro wants is a single simple treatment.”

“Pills to produce GM humans!”

“Not quite, Tim. One of my old Uni lines of research seemed to offer a very elegant solution.”

I said, very definitely, “Elta, I do palaeogenetics. Not supermen.”

“There’s an overlap. We have some remarkable Russian work on energy analogues from the ISS days. You could reconstruct ancient DNA here.”

I was still suspicious. She hadn’t given me any scientific details of her enhancement work, anything I could relate to my own knowledge. “Elta, I keep saying tell me, and you keep giving me only half a story. What are you hiding?”

Smiling Spiro cut in. “Elta, if anyone’s still hung up over your old relationship, it’s not Timmy boy. It’s you. Tell him the lot.”

Which implied that Elta had revealed her secrets to one former lover, but not yet to me.

* * *

I had first met Spiro in Bangladesh, in that brief period between the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic icecaps, when the seas had come up only six metres and there were still international organisations trying to cope.

My sponsors knew the second icecap was about to go — whatever the governments said — and had sent me east to excavate recent fossil remains before the rest of the lowlands got flooded. A creationist gig. Science wasn’t too popular among refugees screaming for rice, and it didn’t help that U.S. helicopters were still fighting terrorists instead of dropping food. The Bangladeshi conscripts rounded up a whole bunch of us expats, and locked us into a so-called camp to starve. The last delivery of new inmates included Spiro.

Outside, the world had bigger issues than a few missing Westerners. Most of the low Pacific islands were submerged already, finishing off the evacuations that had started in 2005, but similar problems had hit Tokyo, New York, Alexandria and all the other coastal danger zones. Holland had started to build floating houses, but not soon enough. New Orleans was gone, finally. That was just the effect of the sea level.

Worse followed as global warming got serious. Asia lost its Himalayan snows, hence lost the meltwater irrigating its rice paddies. Heat waves killed off the sick and elderly in tandem with disease killing off the young. As for Africa, nobody wanted to know.

In the Americas most governments and financial communities were bankrupt, only functioning as ghost organisations through inertia, with people still doing their old jobs because they still hoped everything would work out somehow. This was before the second icecap went down.

Meanwhile, behind barbed wire on the Ganges delta, we found that our one water tap had gone dry.

I never discovered what kind of deal Spiro pulled off, but that evening a little wire-cutter tool came flying over our fence. A dozen or so of us wriggled through before the shooting started. I stayed with Spiro because I’d tagged him as a survivor. I was right. We hauled each other out of muddy ditches or worse for a week, until a Republic of Australia Navy hydrographic boat chugged up the coast bringing emergency supplies. The two of us swam out to it.

In Darwin, recuperating with RAN personnel who added our problems to their own, I learned that Spiro’s last name was Achilleos. Slightly familiar, but I couldn’t think why. Years later, when Singapore and Guinea-Bissau and the Gaza Strip were all ancient history, something reminded me that Elta had mentioned a holiday affair once. With a man called Spyros Achilleos.

* * *

“Come and have a look at the lab,” said Elta. “I’ll talk you through the process.”

“About time, if you’ve hired me for my expertise.” I still suspected something more personal was involved, but I stood up with her. Spiro came too.

In the corridor, the antique lift chamber opened before Elta could thumb its panel. A Gurkha with stripes and medal ribbons saluted her. “The Chief sends his compliments, Doctor Miss. He thinks you should attend Laboratory Number Three. The subject has locked himself in.”

“We’re going to Three now,” said Elta calmly. “Thank you for the message.”

The four of us went down together, but Elta looked oddly at me. “Tim, you’d better wait in the foyer. Spiro, brief him.”

My thoughts formed a picture from all this, finally, but I kept silent until I wasn’t trapped in a lift box with her and the Gurkha. While the two of them hurried down a corridor, I accepted Spiro’s offer of a chair facing the main door as reluctantly as we’d accepted so many dodgy offers from each other over the years.

Beyond his bald spot I saw a view of some old woman outside searching the clear-fire zone, dipping like a pigeon to scavenge debris. Couldn’t be any airborne retroviruses floating around from the Fountain of Youth. No, whatever danger threatened us wasn’t outside; the two guards behind their steel desk were watching the corridor, not us. I tried to look nonchalant as I leaned forward to the devil I knew.

“Spiro, I don’t figure Elta dashing off and leaving me. Is this a set-up?”

“No. It’s an emergency.”

But an emergency without alarm sirens, except in my head.

“Okay,” I said. “She said to brief me. Let me recap first.” I was old enough to work out the facts of life myself. “You’ve got an experimental subject holed up in the exact same lab Elta wanted to show me. Your superman pills could mean major power shifts worldwide. But next, you haul in a palaeogeneticist. What gives? Does your big boss know what’s going on?”

Spiro nodded. “He knows everything. Timmy boy, haven’t you guessed yet what Elta’s done?”

I remembered that her appearance had been unchanged rather than enhanced. “Something else doesn’t figure. I knew Elta when she was developing Kosmetika. She always preferred to test the good stuff on herself.”

“Still true, Timmy boy. You’re getting close.”

I saw him glance down that corridor to Lab Three, then I snapped, “So what the hell did she do to the guy in there?”

“She tried to make him an adult.”

* * *

The human body is strangely foetal in character. We are large-headed, almost hairless, slow-developing. Except for size, we humans might be a variety of simian baby which never grows up. I had helped re-evaluate the hominin fossil record in Zanzibar and Bangladesh, my results not always pleasing to my creationist clients. The fossils showed one robust hominin going extinct just as a new gracile form appeared. Elta, I learned, had connected this to my postgrad ideas about the relationship between chimpanzees and people. Humans could well be neotenous apes. Elta being Elta, she decided to test the theory. She gave someone biochemicals, a course of treatment to develop his body into our hypothetical adult form.

“I hope he was a volunteer,” I said.

I could imagine the result as some movie ape-monster. Elta had given Dr Jekyll the potion to become Mr Hyde. A cousin to bonobos and gorillas, but still human inside. My scientific common-sense listened and objected. “Hey, that’s not possible, ontologically! She’d have had to reverse all the changes of adolescence before her treatment could start.”

“True,” said Spiro. “So she started on him young.”

Suddenly I understood why the project had to be secret. Nobody, certainly not the Christians next door, would have liked her work.

Elta had experimented on a child.

I stood up, feeling sick.

“So she snatched some little kid!”

“No abduction, Timmy boy. Elta had embryos. She took one of her own and divided it through the old fertility treatments until she had eight to play with. There’s one normal survivor around, the control you might say, but otherwise most of the subjects didn’t make it. Tony in our lab is the last one.”

Suddenly I wanted to see that lab. I needed more answers. “Tony, you call him. Is he grown up?”

“Fully.”

“Tall, strong?”

“Yes.”

“Hairy?”

“Yes.”

“Long-lived?”

“Very, if we’re right. The neighbours call this our Methuselah project.”

Maybe I was wrong about the local Christians not approving. I recalled that some early Bible passage supposedly described the last stages of God’s work in human evolution. The sixth day. Did Elta’s neighbours think Adam and Eve had sprung from hairy near-immortal giants?

Whatever that child had gone through, I had one sure way of ending its misery. The searchers had never found my osteogun.

“I’m going in there,” I said, and Spiro had to race after me.

“Tim! You know better than most what makes us human! I checked out your contracts. You can show Elta where she went wrong!”

“She went wrong when she started it,” I growled, and then we reached the end of the corridor.

* * *

I saw an unforgettable tableau outside the steel door. Three guards gripped unmarked rifles on the left, then the girl from my past faced the door, and two mechanic types set up cutting torches hastily. My eyes came back to Elta. From head to toe she hadn't changed: short black hair, neat white top and dark trousers, figure still trim. I realised why nobody afterwards had ever persuaded me to settle down. She was the key to everything here, me included.

“Antonio,” she called through the glass panel, “just slide the bar!”

A mighty thump rattled the hatch cover.

Anger drove me forward, born of a revulsion at what she’d done and tried to make me a part of. And the flame cutter arriving meant that Plan B must be underway; those rifles looked ready for action. I caught her shoulder. “Elta! What’s happening in there?”

* * *

“He won’t listen to us!” Elta pulled free of me. “He’s trashing the place.”

Typical prisoner behaviour, I recalled. “Don’t you ever let him out?”

“We used to. He was getting restless.”

Our Christian driver had mentioned some Bigfoot type nearby: that made sense now. At least they’d allowed the poor kid a little fresh air. I could have yelled so much at Elta, there outside the lab door, but I became aware of vibrations, of heavy crashes inside.

“He sounds frustrated.”

“That’s literally true, Tim. He’s had a quick puberty without females.”

Fortunately she saw my expression and cut short the details. Through the panel I glimpsed a mass of reddish-brown fur disappearing into a corner. He must be big. Scatters of debris had been furniture and equipment.

“I take it you can’t reason with him.”

“Tony understands simple English, but his throat can’t speak it properly. He doesn’t think like we do. It’s like talking to a pet dog.”

Great news. The true adult form of humanity wasn’t intelligent.

“So you’re not going to deliver super-warriors by this route?”

“We’ll discuss your role in that later, Tim. Meanwhile, yes, Tony is a dead end.”

End. Dead. I gazed at the rifles, not the usual AK-47s but sleek new-looking designs. I felt sick again.

“So you think the kindest thing is to write off the development costs and shoot him,” I said. A rational solution even if I hated it. There were no simple answers in the current climate; we all faced hard decisions.

“No. Don’t assume the worst.” Elta pointed to the nearest rifle. “We fire tranquiliser darts.” (I exhaled in relief.) “Tim, I raised him from a baby. I loved all my sons, believe me.”

Even when experimenting on them. A strange kind of mother to her brood of clones. And where was their father?

The father. Another memory returned.

I glared at the apprehensive face of Spiro.

* * *

Several times during my world travels I’d run across Professor Spyros Achilleos. Fast-moving contract people tended to meet up over the years. Mostly we’d met on projects to repopulate Africa where new rainfall brought greening, but also there had been that mad scheme to complete sequencing the mammoth genome and recreate animals useful in the new Arctic. Spiro, the facilitator, had lured me away from my chosen warm regions into an icy tunnel which contained Russian-mafia mammoth tissues. There, at last, I’d tackled him about Elta. He said he’d seen her recently.

“These things burn themselves out.” Spiro had shrugged. “But you, Timmy boy, I think she would have stayed with you, if things had worked out differently. I know you two were trying for a family. But her kind of man probably doesn’t exist.”

I got angry. I threw myself at him like the movie hunk I wasn’t. The tunnel framed our shouts, our punches, our breath frosting between frozen walls... until the moment turned, and we stood panting and agreeing at last.

Elta was in the past. For us both.

* * *

What I recalled now, standing outside the Biocom lab where a recreated hominin raged inside, was that Spiro had said “You two were trying for a family.”

Elta had obtained her original embryo right here in England. From me.

How had she managed to preserve it as civilisation disintegrated? Cold storage and protection deals? But I’d never come back, and eventually she put it to a different use.

“No,” I said instinctively. “You can’t shoot him.”

One reason I’d left the research labs had been our treatment of helpless furry things; ever after, I killed only when it became absolutely necessary for survival. Another reason: Tony’s race, the old adult race, had never brought their world to Year Zero. And, most importantly, he was my son.

The face coming forward to peer at mine was hairy, but human. Almost. Underneath that fur was my own flesh, my DNA. And hers. After my years and decades of responsibility to nobody, I was suddenly a father. Spiro’s early reticence was explained. I couldn’t blame him or Elta for trying to break the news gently.

Father or not, I’d been brought here to sort out Tony. Under the scar hidden by my wristwatch was the osteogun, the mini-laser no frisking could find. Should I aim my hand through the hatch and end Tony’s botched life? The decision was mine. But I’d made my decision already, surely. I’d said, “You can’t shoot him.”

I stood aside from the hatch. Live and let live didn’t need to be difficult.

Elta said, “You can help us with him afterwards.” She gestured to her crew. “Friends, melt out that glass.” Tranquiliser time.

I suppose that was the moment when I joined her team.

* * *

Back in her office overlooking the rubble-heaps of Manchester, I reviewed her scientific summary. Elta had interpreted her findings correctly. She could treat children so that they would grow up into our long-lost adult form (the so-called growing pains of adolescence were actually retardation pains) but the resulting beings would not be our kind of human. I could see why.

“You missed one little thing. Your background was cosmetics, not meds, so you never studied Down’s syndrome.”

That particular chromosomal disorder affected growth, causing learning disabilities and a characteristic body structure, the symptoms in face and hands and teeth often indicating neoteny. I suspected now that Down’s syndrome was a variant of our general human retardation from adulthood, since I knew that the problem lay in the 21st pair of chromosomes, the region most affected by Elta’s treatment.

“In fact,” I told her, “your techniques have got to be good for treating genetic conditions. No supermen, but you could still help a lot of people.” Including those underperforming kids the Christians had been caring for. And including Tony?

Spiro looked impatient. He pointed upwards.

“Oh yes, time to move, thanks,” said Elta. “Tim, you’ll stay to make a full evaluation, of course. I hope you won’t mind some genome comparisons. Before that, though...” She gave her first smile. “Pietro wants to meet you.”

“Your Big Chief?” I was wary again.

“Yes. Actually Pietro is Tony’s elder brother. I had him when time seemed to be going on.”

So bringing me back had been personal all along, and my smiling mentor had guided me home safely in his own crooked way. After Kansas, I might even come home again.

I waved Spiro goodbye. I went up with Elta to meet my other son.